IT IS a catalogue of atrocities that has shocked Australia and prompted the Government to declare Aboriginal people incapable of deciding their own destinies.

A two-year-old Aboriginal girl was raped by a drunk relative who took her from outside her house while her mother was out, also drunk.

A six-year-old girl was raped anally by an 18-year-old Aboriginal petrol-sniffer at a waterhole. She drowned as she was raped.

Another Aboriginal man raped a seven-month-old girl after taking her from a room of sleeping adults. The baby needed surgery under general anaesthetic for her injuries.

A two-month-old baby was stabbed by her father as he attacked his wife.

A violent father had frequent sex with his daughter as she shared a bed with her mother, and made her pregnant.

A couple married their 14-year-old daughter to a man in his late 60s whom she did not know. He took her away by force. She later told police: “I told that man I was too young for sex, but he didn’t listen.”

These and other chilling stories of rape and murder in the squalid Aboriginal communities of Central Australia were in a dossier compiled for police chiefs by Dr Nanette Rogers, the Crown Prosecutor in Alice Springs.

That dossier has now been leaked to Australia’s national broadcaster, prompting the Government to reappraise urgently its relations with the country’s semi-autonomous Aboriginal communities.

Mal Brough, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, declared: “It is a fact that there is rampant indigenous violence, and I think Australian society needs to face up to that reality, accept it, and then also [agree] as a nation that we aren’t going to accept this any longer.”

He said that he would not support moves toward offering Aboriginal people greater autonomy. He added that the Government’s efforts to respect Aboriginal customs by allowing elders to deal with crimes themselves had failed, and the police had to tackle crimes within indigenous communities like any others.

“People have got to see it for what it is,” he said. “It’s abuse, it’s crime and it’s violence and it must stop.”

The revelations fuelled Australia’s mounting alarm about brutality and deprivation inside many of the remote Aboriginal communities and those on the outskirts of larger towns in the Outback.

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